Wednesday, 10 December 2014

It’s the same every year.Every fall, a few weeks into piano classes, I introduce my Sunbeams 3
class to the Preparatory Repertoire book from the Royal Conservatory of
Music.I’m always excited to get to this
point with my students; after months and months playing from the Music for
Young Children books, they are ready to start on the Royal Conservatory
pathway, heading off towards exam certification and the satisfaction of being
able to say “I have my Grade x piano”.I try to convey this excitement and sense of a new beginning
to the children, and I see that I’ve piqued their interest, but when I open the
book to show them the first piece they will learn, the response is always the
same:Silence.Widened eyes.

I know what they’re thinking.

“It looks hard, doesn’t it?” I ask them.And it does.The RCM music really does look a lot harder.It’s not, though.These pieces
are not more difficult than the music these children already play.

I open their current Sunbeams 3 book and place a page next
to the RCM prep book for comparison.I
ask the students to tell me why they think the new music looks harder.They all gaze it for a moment, and then one
child will realize:“It’s written
smaller”.

Aha!When things
are written smaller, they seem harder.Just knowing this fact helps the kids understand that this book isn’t
going to be more difficult to play.But
unfortunately, the smaller print does actually make this music harder for the
children to read.

As I discussed in my last post , when we read music,
we fixate our eyes on a particular note, reading it, and also reading the
adjacent notes that are in our peripheral vision.Then we quickly flick our eyes forward and
fixate on another note further along the page.It’s this business of reading in our peripheral vision that’s
problematic.

Take a look at the example below.Focus your eyes on the dot in the
middle.You can read the single letter
on the left with no problem, correct?But what about trying to read the middle of the three letters on the
right?That letter “b” on the right is
much harder to read because the letters on either side interfere with our
perception of it.This is the visual crowding effect, and
it has been shown to occur for all visual perception, whether of letters or
musical notes on a page, or for other objects.

When we read a page of music, our ability to take in a lot
of notes at one fixation is limited by crowding.The further the notes are from our point
of focus, the more they are susceptible to crowding.Reading musical notation has a further crowding
problem that doesn’t exist in text reading:the lines of the staff themselves act to crowd in the vertical
direction.Compare these two notes, one
with flanking staff lines, and one without.Can you see if the note is on or off of the line?When there are flanking staff lines, it is
much harder to tell.

Interestingly, a study using exactly this kind of visual test has shown that trained musicians have learned to overcome some of the
effects of crowding.People who are expert
music readers are better able to read crowded notes in their peripheral
vision.It’s as if their spatial
resolution for music notes is increased compared to non-musicians.The authors suggest that when we practice
reading music, we build a better representation of the visual musical elements
in our brains, which then helps our perception of the notes on the page.The more we read music, the less crowded the
notes seem.

But my students?They
are not yet expert music-readers.I’ve
noticed that when the sheet music is hard to read, the children rely on their
ears to learn the piece, and ignore the written music. This will not improve their music-reading skills.

My kids still need their music to be well-spaced, so that adjacent notes
don’t interfere with each other.It’s
not so much that the notes need to be bigger, but they need to be less crowded,
both horizontally and vertically.In
fact, when I compare the RCM Prep book with the MYC materials, what I notice is
that the horizontal spacing is actually the same.What’s obviously different between the two
books is the spacing between the lines of the staff.The only way to reduce the vertical crowding
is to make larger spaces between adjacent notes and between the lines of the
staff – in other words, print it bigger.I think a larger print encourages our young students to keep reading the
notes, rather than relying on their ears to learn the music.If the notes are printed bigger and less
crowded,students are better able to
perceive the subtle differences between adjacent notes, making it more
worthwhile keeping their eyes on the page to decode the musical notation.

About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.